Background: Commonly, the management of the main hospital activities are organized by different software packages that run on desktop computers which may not always allow a fast and practical use by health operators. This problem could be alleviated through the use of mobile health. The aim of this study was to give an overview of smartphone and tablet applications used for hospital management and administration, in order to evaluate their features and analyse them according to their contents, number of downloads and field of application.Methods: Researchers performed the survey on the two main application stores available on the Internet: iTunes for Apple devices and Google Play for Android devices. Using specific keywords, 47 apps were identified and met inclusion criteria.Results: Most of the applications were designed for health operators and patients' management (76.6%), 12.8% were apps focused on the organization and setting of the hospital resources, while 10.6% included apps that could help hospital administrators to perform self-evaluations of their structures, processes and outcomes. The large majority of apps (80.7%) counted less than 1000 downloads. Most of them (87.5%) were in English and free to download (93.6%). Discussion:The results of first attempt to provide an overview about this emerging topic showed how, despite the existence of several applications for hospital management purposes, these tools appear to be still poorly widespread. In our opinion, there is a strong need to assess furtherly the quality of these applications, thus it may be worth to continue monitoring this field in order to analyse eventual improvements in the design and diffusion of these apps.

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